professor of mechanical engineering (1960- )
When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
By separating the function of adaptation from the function of maintaining the integrity of individual genes, sex allows much greater diversity while still keeping genes whole. Sex is not only fun, it is good engineering practice.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
It's hard to build large-scale, general-purpose quantum computers. I hope that we can cross that hurdle soon and build general-purpose quantum computers with hundreds or thousands of quantum bits. But the most important hurdle is in our own understanding. Unless we can understand how the world processes information at a quantum level, we will remain in the dark.
SETH LLOYD
interview, American Scientist, 2006
Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.
SETH LLOYD
attributed, "Seth Lloyd on quantum computing", Inside the Box
Right now, we have small, general-purpose quantum computers that can basically do anything you ask them to, if you ask nicely. Then we have large, special-purpose quantum computers that can solve specific problems better than classical computers can. What we don't have is a large, general-purpose quantum computer of the sort that would be needed to break codes, strike fear in the heart of the National Security Agency and other three-letter agencies. Which is probably a good thing.
SETH LLOYD
"A Quantum Leap in Computing", NOVA, July 21, 2011
When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.
SETH LLOYD
"Life, the Universe, and Everything", WIRED, March 2006
My colleagues and I recently showed that you can think of time travel, the process of going from the future into the past, as a kind of teleportation of information from now to back then. Moreover, we were actually able to use a simple quantum computer to demonstrate this effect. We could investigate what happens when you send a photon billionths of a second backwards in time.
SETH LLOYD
"A Quantum Leap in Computing", NOVA, July 21, 2011
It's not a fantasy to explore this question about making computers that are much, much, more powerful than the kind that we have sitting around now -- in which a grain of salt has all the computational powers of all the computers in the world.
SETH LLOYD
interview, Edge
Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe.
SETH LLOYD
"Q & A: Seth Lloyd", MIT Technology Review, July 1, 2006
Yes, I am a quantum mechanic! Those darn quantum computers break all the time.
SETH LLOYD
"Life, the Universe, and Everything", WIRED, March 2006
Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.
SETH LLOYD
"Life, the Universe, and Everything", WIRED, March 2006
For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.
SETH LLOYD
"Move Aside, Sex", The Edge Annual Question--2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
Something else has happened with computers. What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings -- and their artifacts -- we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process.
SETH LLOYD
"How Fast, How Small, and How Powerful?"
Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.
SETH LLOYD
Nature, August 26, 2004
The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.
SETH LLOYD
attributed, The Clock and the Arrow
The original sexual revolution was a tour de force, a huge success that came from what at first glance looks like a bad idea. Why bad? Because it risked losing valuable information. A successful bacterium, reproducing asexually, passes on its exact genetic makeup (absent the occasional mutation) to its offspring. But if an organism reproduces sexually, its genes are scrambled with those of its mate in order to produce the offspring's genes, a process called recombination. Because each half of this offspring's genes came from a different parent, and because of the scrambling process, no matter how successful either parent's unique combination of genes, the offspring's genome will not be the same as that parent's. Sexual reproduction has never passed on a full winning combination intact. Sex messes with success.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe